The Serpent-Hooded Jina

Parshva is the most readily recognised of all the Tirthankaras in art, for he is almost always shown sheltered by the hood of a many-headed serpent (commonly seven-headed). The image illustrates a story of his ascetic career: as Parshva sat in deep meditation, an enemy from a former life, in the accounts the demon or ascetic Kamatha (Meghamalin), loosed a violent storm to break his concentration, and the serpent-king Dharanendra, with his queen Padmavati, rose up to shield the motionless Jina with his hoods. The serpent canopy became his fixed iconographic mark, and his emblem is likewise the snake.

He is among the most widely worshipped of the ford-makers in living Jain practice, and Jains hold that he attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar, the great pilgrimage hill in Jharkhand that bears his name, Parasnath. Venerated as a fully liberated soul whose community Mahavira carried forward, Parshva stands at the hinge where Jain sacred history opens into the historical.